The end of big government?

Todd Rokita, Republican of Indiana, is coming to Washington and leaves no doubt that he means business: He got elected to Congress to upend the status quo, to clean up what he sees as a mess of bloated spending and government overreach that is endangering the country’s future.

He says he has a mandate from voters to push for an early vote to repeal the health care overhaul. At 40, Rokita says he and his generation of conservatives are ready “to rethink, unwind and restructure everything” government does, from entitlement reforms to defense spending.

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Rokita can sound plenty bold. But there is one subject that makes him seem rather cautious. It is when the conversation turns to comparisons between the young, ambitious Republican class of 2010 that will come roaring in next month and the young, ambitious Republican class of 1994, which came roaring in 16 years ago and eventually found the task of radically reducing the role of government a lot more complicated than it had bargained for.

In a POLITICO interview, Rokita said at first that he doesn’t “spend a lot of time focusing on ’94.” At 24, he was more interested in “watching girls” than watching Congress. But he acknowledged that he did “study the ’94 class” while contemplating his current choices and has tried to absorb the lessons of the “Republican Revolution” that Newt Gingrich led nearly a generation ago.

“It seemed to me that they swung at everything,” Rokita said, adding: “We are different as a class.”

How different? And how ready will this Republican Congress be to swing again in an effort to achieve the conservative dream of a refocused, reconceived and, above all, smaller federal government?

President Bill Clinton, maneuvering to defeat Gingrich while also bowing to the spirit of the times, famously declared in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of Big Government is over.” That proved premature, to put it mildly. But memories of the 1990s budget battles — the triumphant certitudes of those Gingrich Republicans, the recriminations that flowed when they lost the battle for public opinion during two government shutdowns — are coloring the calculations of people in both parties as Washington girds for a new and similar battle over the size and scope of government.

It certainly echoes for someone like Rep. Marlin Stutzman, another Indiana Republican new to Washington. “I think we can learn from history,” he said, adding that “we’re not far from ’94, so that’s fresh in our minds.”

Stutzman, 34, was 19 years old and fresh out of Michigan’s Lake Area Christian High School during the two government shutdowns that began in November and December of 1995. They stretched a total of 26 days in which most of the federal work force was furloughed and all but essential services ground to a halt. The crisis, which independent voters blamed on Republicans, was an essential part of Clinton’s political revival after a midterm debacle similar to the one President Barack Obama and Democrats suffered in November.